[ExI] france again

[Rafal Smigrodzki]

On 5/31/07, Stathis Papaioannou <stathisp at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> On 31/05/07, Eugen Leitl <eugen at leitl.org> wrote:
> > On Thu, May 31, 2007 at 09:42:12AM +0200, Amara Graps wrote:
> >
> > > Europeans were only slightly less productive than the Americans.
> >
> > Nobody can tell me they can work at full concentration 12 hours
> > straight. The effective work done would be somewhere in 7-8
> > hour range. So why spend these unproductive hours at work,
> > when one could spend them in a much nicer environment?
>
> The table in the following article suggests that there is not that much
> difference between Europe and America, and in fact France beats the US in
> productivity per hour worked. Factor in the premium on the US dollar due to
> US political might, and there isn't much in it at all.
>
> http://www.cepr.net/documents/publications/energy_2006_12.pdf
>
### The standard explanation for this is that the US economy accepts
large numbers of poorly educated immigrants, offering them a chance to
improve their situation (and of course benefiting everyone else) - but
given their lower productivity, the average goes down, even though
both immigrants and almost all locals get better in absolute terms.

On the other hand, the slightly more statist economy of France
excludes millions of people, predominantly young, from participation
in the economy - regulations make it too expensive to hire
inexperienced, less productive workers, and therefore you have both a
high productivity among the employed and millions of unemployed.

If you look at other measures of performance, like per capita GNP, US
wins hands down. Voluntary, longer work hours make sense.

Rafal